animepahe-dl-tmux 1.4.1

AnimePahe downloader with automatic Cloudflare bypass via Playwright

AnimePahe Downloader

Downloads anime from animepahe.com.
Uses a real Chromium browser via Playwright to automatically solve Cloudflare's JS challenge — no manual cookie juggling needed.

Why Playwright?

AnimePahe uses Cloudflare's "Managed Challenge" (interactive JS mode) on every route including the JSON API.
Standard HTTP clients (requests, httpx, curl_cffi) cannot execute JavaScript and therefore always get a 403.
Playwright runs a real Chromium instance that solves the challenge exactly as a human browser would.

Installation

pip install animepahe-dl-tmux

# Required one-time setup — installs the Chromium browser (~150 MB):
playwright install chromium

If you skip playwright install chromium you will get a "Browser not found" error.

Usage

animepahe-dl-tmux                          # interactive — prompts for everything
animepahe-dl-tmux "Demon Slayer"           # search immediately, pick episodes interactively
animepahe-dl-tmux "Demon Slayer" --all     # download every episode
animepahe-dl-tmux "Demon Slayer" -e 1-5   # episodes 1 through 5
animepahe-dl-tmux "Demon Slayer" -e 1,3,7 # specific episodes
animepahe-dl-tmux "Demon Slayer" --visible # show the browser window (debug)

How It Works

1. Playwright launches a headless Chromium browser and visits animepahe.com.
2. Cloudflare's JS challenge runs inside the real browser — it solves automatically (~5–15 s).
3. The solved session cookies (cf_clearance etc.) are extracted and reused in fast httpx API calls.
4. For each episode, the script navigates to kwik.si in the browser and intercepts the HLS .m3u8 URL from network traffic.
5. ffmpeg downloads and muxes the HLS stream into a single .mp4 file.

Output

Files are saved to downloads/<Anime Title>/Episode_NNNN.mp4 in the current directory.

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Fix
Browser not found	Run playwright install chromium
CloudflareError: Timed out	Run with --visible to watch the browser; may need a manual CAPTCHA click
ffmpeg: command not found	Install ffmpeg: winget install ffmpeg (Windows) or brew install ffmpeg (Mac) or apt install ffmpeg (Linux)
No players found for an episode	The episode may not be available yet on AnimePahe

Requirements

• Python 3.9+
• ffmpeg (in system PATH)
• Chromium browser: install with playwright install chromium (~150 MB, one-time)